As I decided to write about this topic, my mind told me that I had written about this before. As I searched through the archive, it looked like I did not.

Defaults matter.

No matter what we’re building — whether it’s a habit, a tool, a company, or a culture — we need to pay very close attention to what the defaults are. If someone follows our process and accepts all the defaults, what kind of outcome does that create for them and the people around them?

The defaults matter

In the article linked above, Jason thought about defaults in terms of habits, company, and culture. I have always thought about it in terms of tools.

There are so many tools I have stopped using cause I did not quite like the defaults the software shipped with. Did the software not have an option to change the font, spacing or colours? They did. It’s just that after changing these, I did not quite like how the software felt. I was not too fond of the defaults the software shipped with either.

The tools that I have stuck with are those for which I liked the defaults. As I write this post on Craft, I have hardly made any changes to the software since I installed it. The same was not true for every other writing software I tried before.